"Well, we gotta make him into a white guy somehow, is that it?" Stewart quipped. "He's like George Washington—except not at all."

In other cases, it wasn't the political tributes that were offensive, but the thousands of comments appearing below them on Facebook. CNN combed through some of the particularly revolting comments that flooded Ted Cruz's Facebook page:

"You know the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was like, 'Why the f-- did I get dragged into this?'" Stewart quipped. But he then turned his attention to "non-anonymous jerks on the TV," like former Senator Rick Santorum, who summed up the leader's legacy by comparing the injustice he fought—apartheid—with the "great injustice" of Obamacare today.

"How do I put this in terms you'll understand: apartheid is not Obamacare!" an outraged Stewart responded. "The systemic subjugation of a race of people is different from the establishment of subsidized healthcare exchanges. The fact that insurance is now mandated again gets us nowhere close to apartheid-level injustice in any way [or] shape."